Over the last two years I have been atop my soap box screaming VIDEO…VIDEO…VIDEO!  The onequestion that stumps the sales guys and customers alike is, Why?  Why video and why now?  It’s been around for 25 years and hasn’t gone viral so what is different about today. Three things are at the epicenter of this movement, Bandwidth, Quality and Relationship Management.

Bandwidth in the 80’s and early 90’s was calculated in bits per second, and in the late 90s to early 2000’s it moved to kilobits per second and now in the early 201x’s we are measuring bandwidth in the megabits and even gigabits per second.  Video is about the experience;it’s about being able to talk to someone face to face without having the voice lag 2 seconds behind the facial movement. Bandwidth to present the moving pictures with high enough resolution to forget you are using video has begun to hit the market wholesale.  Even 4G wireless carriers are bringing speeds between 50 – 100 MB to mobile devices. The bandwidth to our offices and homes is more stable and affordable than ever before.  The bandwidth is here for video.

Quality is the ability to get the video from one device to another reliably every time.  Now that we have conquered the size of the pipe we have to manage the flow control of the pipe. Quality of Service defines which data packets get priority on the wire.  QOS has blossomed into a critical component of all networks as the telephony industry has moved away from traditional analogue PBXs to Voice over IP on converged networks carrying bothvoice and data on the same wire.  With about 10 years of VoIP in the industry QOS is now both pervasive and considered high priority in a majority of corporate networks.  QOS guarantees that voice and video data will receive priority over web surfing, music streaming and file sharing.  The corporate investments in QOS for VoIP have created the ideal network to enable Video.

Relationship management moves us beyond the technical aspects of our conversation and into the reason for video in the first place,the experience.  Video is not about communicating it is about communication. When one makes a phone call and talks to someone there is no doubt that you are communicating, but the subtleties of communication are missing.  Facial expressions, eye’s rolling, yawns,grins and frowns all say as much if not more than the words someone chooses to express.  Communication builds relationships by capturing attention during the moment of the conversation and either builds trust or expresses visually points that one may feel are not being accepted as true via the individual hearing and seeing them.  Managers want to see their employees,business partners want to see one another, team members want validation for ideas and numerous other use scenarios all rotate around the experience. 

Relationship management can now us video collaboration because it has low cost bandwidth and pervasive quality to provide a real life experience.   What are you doing to enable video?